The balancing act for him is between the headline yield that allows him to make the quarterly income payments to his unit-holders while not scrimping on the quality of the underlying dividend that underpins the distribution.
With this in mind, buying into poor-performing sectors to take advantage of the sell-off in bond proxies has certainly worked as has taking profits and reducing exposure from a couple of high-flying financial stocks.
Part 1
A quarter of Dan Roberts’ Fidelity Global Dividend fund is in consumer cyclical and defensive stocks.
However, he runs the fund on the basis of company valuations and his stock-picking skills so it is patently not a play on the growth in wealthy consumers and the numbers of middle class in emerging markets and Asia.
Here he explains what he considers as fundamental company strengths and how it results in him having ten times the emerging market exposure on a look-through basis than by direct stock ownership.
Part 2